Cracco recalled the family’s voyage here from Genoa in a state-room—an elegant but deceptive term for a three-meter-square chamber with one bare light and no windows. The only passenger in the family untroubled by seasickness was Beppe, yet unborn, and sleeping without care in the warmth of his own private ocean.
The men looked around carefully. The highway was crowded with traffic but the pier was hidden from view by a half dozen boxcars on a siding. No pedestrians here; there were no walkways and all the businesses nearby were closed for the night. Cracco noted boat traffic on the Hudson, of course, the hulls largely invisible in the dark but their running lights bright and festive. The massive black expanse of river was dominated by the huge Maxwell House coffee sign, with its forty-five-foot cup, tilted and empty (the company’s slogan: “Good to the last drop”). It glowed brightly. Cracco believed there’d been a time when it had been shut off in the evenings—not to save money but so that it wouldn’t serve as a beacon to enemy bombers. Now it was lit again, the country apparently no longer believing that the enemy would bring the war to its home shores. Erroneously, of course.
He pulled the truck up alongside the ship. Kohl handed the pistol to Cracco. It seemed hot, though that would be impossible on a night like this. He looked at it once, then put the weapon in his pocket as well.
“Are you ready?” Kohl asked.
For a moment, he wasn’t. Not at all. He wanted to hurry back home. But then he thought again: Payback.
And Luca Cracco nodded.
They stepped out into the cutting wind and walked to the edge of the pier, watching the crews secure the ship with ropes. A few minutes later the captain hobbled down the gangway.
“Bonsoir!” he called.
As it turned out, the guns were unnecessary. The captain, a grizzled fellow, wrapped in scarves and two jackets and chewing on a pipe, didn’t seem the least suspicious that a man who looked Italian and one who looked German were picking up cargo from war-ravaged Europe. And to the crew, these were just harried workers collecting a mundane shipment for their business.
Cracco spoke only marginal French, so it was Kohl who conversed with the man and pointed to Cracco, the consignee. Stomping his feet against the cold, the captain offered the bill of lading. The baker scrawled his name and took a carbon copy. Kohl paid the man in cash.
Five minutes later, seamen winched a one-by-one-meter crate to the pier and then muscled it into the back of the truck. Kohl tipped them and they hurried back to the warmth of the vessel.
Inside the bread truck, Kohl clicked on a flashlight and the two men examined the crate marked with Etienne et Fils Fabrication on the side. The German said, “Port of entry was New Jersey. Customs cleared it there.”
Cracco imagined a lethargic civil servant glancing into the packing crate at the device and not bothering to inspect further. Perhaps he hadn’t bothered even to look inside. Kohl pried the top off and they looked down at the small bakery oven, painted green. The only difference between this and a real oven was that the one they now examined included a large metal tank, as if for gas, to fire the burners.
Cracco whispered, “That’s it?”
Kohl said nothing but nodded, and his eyes shone as if he were proud of what was contained in the canister. As surely he was.
“I would have expected bigger,” Cracco said.
“Yes, yes. That’s the point, now, isn’t it? Let’s get back. We’ve been here too long as it is.”
Jack Murphy was deciding that shivers were creatures unto themselves. He couldn’t stop them. They roamed his body, from neck to calf. Some playful, some downright sadistic.
His teeth chattered, too.
The OSS agent was hiding behind the switching station where an old Hudson and Manhattan R. R. track split off from the New York Central main line. The spur ended on a shabby pier, about fifty yards south from where the two spies were taking delivery of the shipment that one of his better intelligence contacts had alerted him to. Murphy had been staking out the place since he’d left OSS headquarters that afternoon, battling the tear-inducing cold.
His contact had told him that the shipment was arriving on this dock on this vessel today, the only delivery in Manhattan, but had said nothing more. Hence his long and arduous vigil. Finally, to his relief, he’d watched the bakery truck come into view along Miller Highway and then turn onto the service road and ease carefully over the icy ground to the pier.
Cracco’s Bakery
Luca Cracco, Prop.
Est. 1938
Bakery truck, of course; because the shipment was an oven.
A New York Central locomotive, towing passengers headed home from the day’s work in Lower Manhattan, had just left the Spring Street terminal, south, to his left, and now passed by. The thick perfume of diesel fumes filled the air in its wake.
More shivers, which replicated and sent their brood to muscles he didn’t know he had.